A trio of diverse exhibits adds up to a bounty of intriguing art hanging in the galleries at Central Arkansas Library System's Roberts Library in the Little Rock River Market.
Let's start at the top, in the Loft Gallery, with an inspired pairing of Little Rock painters Laura Brainard Raborn and Emily Moll Wood. Works from both artists feature moody figures and florals in "a visual dialogue with the natural world and nature's deep connections to their own family histories," according to press materials for the exhibit, "Natural Connections: Paintings by Emily Moll Wood and Laura Brainard Raborn."
Raborn's oil, acrylic and mixed-media paintings often depict portraits or figures entwined with botanical elements such as flowers and leaves. "Flower Girl" is a good example, as a face seems to emerge from the flora surrounding it. The mysterious "Perched Between" shows the outline of a seated figure, almost like a ghostly photo negative, with a purplish background and leaves of varying greens.
"Observing the Observer" is an engaging, loose, narra-tive-filled oil-on-wood panel portrait of a young person who pleasantly meets the viewer's gaze. There is a halo-like circle around the figure's head, and the background -- a lush mix of teals, blues, greens and reds -- includes three small children in their school uniforms and backpacks walking away from us amid a faint motif of plants.
(A quick aside: Raborn is one of several artists with works in the gallery of the adjacent Concordia Hall. The thick, skillfully applied brushstrokes she uses in the figures of "Watching Her Watching Her [The Artist's Imagination]" are gorgeous.)
Wood's paintings are watercolors, occasionally with ink, on tablecloth or paper. The cloth works are large -- well, they're the size of tablecloths -- and, like Raborn's, morph figures with flowers. Her watercolors contain a sense of drama and story, as in "Hellabores are shy and shady," which depicts a woman and child amid the titular flowering plant on a tablecloth that drapes to the hardwood floor of the gallery. "Anemone Pass," made with acrylic ink on tablecloth, shows a spectral image holding the pinkish flower of the title.
Wood is adept at rendering her images on cloth -- in an earlier series, "Working Shirt," she painted portraits on button-downs -- and being able to view her work up close on the unframed fabric reinforces the idea that paint doesn't have to be contained to traditional supports. Her use of tablecloths, which she inherited and are sometimes tattered and torn, also emphasizes domestic work that is often taken for granted.
The exhibit thoughtfully includes several of Wood's watercolor studies on paper for the larger pieces, and it's enlightening to see her process and her mastery of watercolor.
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"Our Community Through My Lens" is a photography exhibit in the library's Landing Gallery space. The black-and-white photos in the show were taken by homeless people and people living in transitional housing throughout Pulaski County who were given disposable cameras to document their lives and situations.
The images, credited to photographers by first names only, include park scenes, abandoned buildings, flowers growing through a crack in the pavement, leaves in water and a particularly powerful photo of a dancing couple dressed in white. Interestingly, several in the series are framed on top of each other, giving the impression of a window, which is apt in that these pictures give the viewer a glimpse into the everyday lives of people who aren't normally represented.
A short video about the exhibit that includes comments from two of the participants can be seen at cals.org.
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Arkansas artists working in print or digital comics and graphic novels are celebrated in "Illustrated Arkansas: The Art of Comics," the exhibit in the library's Underground Gallery that, according to CALS, was made possible by Randy Duncan, director of the Center for Comics Studies at Henderson State University.
The show features work by Sean Fitzgibbon, Nate Powell, Tanja Wooten, Stephen Koch, David Orr and more. Kasten Searles' "Essential Workers," a page showing grocery clerks in stores in the early days of the pandemic, is one of the first pieces one sees in the exhibit.
A page from Fitzgibbon's recent graphic work of nonfiction, "What Follows Is True: Crescent Hotel," is an example of his skill with watercolor, light and composition.
There's a dynamically pencilled page by Dave Simons from author Michael Tierney's "Wild Stars: The Book of Circles -- Recalibrated." Similarly, Wooten's loose, skillfully penciled early pages from "Womanthology: Space," "The Red Broom" and "Summer of '72 Memoir" are a treat. It's also fascinating to see Wooten's page from "The Aviator and the Elephant" in full color alongside its initial, penciled version.
We also get to observe pages from Gustav Carlson's "Eve of the Ozarks -- Moon Eye's Shine" in their pencilled stages and then in their final, digitally colored forms.
Former Democrat-Gazette graphic artist Dusty Higgins is represented with two exquisitely inked pages from his graphic novel "Pinocchio, Vampire Slayer Volume II."
Higgins collaborated with former Democrat-Gazette reporter Van Jensen on "Pinocchio," and Jensen was the writer of "Two Dead," his 2019 graphic novel that was based on real events in Little Rock and was illustrated by National Book Award winner Nate Powell, who grew up in North Little Rock. Two of Powell's pages from the book are part of the exhibit, and it's a genuine treat to have the opportunity to get close to the heavily inked page 166 and see Powell's ability with contrasting white and black spaces and his strength with design and layout.
Along with the art, the exhibit includes a video about Arkansas comic artists and displays of comics related books by William B. Jones, Jr. and Travis Langley.